A Rough Shoot

BY GEOFFREY HOUSEHOLD

A ROUGH SHOOT

IT ALL BEGAN on an autumn evening so silent and peaceful that no one who had the luck to be out of doors, with copse and downland stretching away from him till the folds of England vanished into a mist of gray and green, could have a thought of human violence. We had had two weeks of storm, and then came this Tuesday, the eighteenth of October, which belonged to late summer. All the life of grass and hedgerow was too busy satisfying hunger to be on guard. I didn’t fire a shot the whole afternoon–not for lack of opportunity but because I wanted to see what game I had on the shoot and what were its movements if undisturbed.

I had rented very cheaply the rough shooting over 450 acres of a remote Dorset farm. The sport wouldn’t have appealed to a man who liked driven pheasants or to a syndicate who expected the mixed bag to pay for their week end. You had to work for your game. But on a favorable afternoon, if your liver and eyes were in good order–for it was speed that counted–you might come home with a brace of partridges, a hare and of course all the rabbits you cared to kill. I shot purely for the pot, and anything I didn’t want I left for another day. I did not even use a dog. That will horrify the purist, but I would assure him that I seldom blazed away at the improbable, and that a bird which I couldn’t retrieve myself was rare. Dull? Yes, if your fun is to fire off a lot of cartridges. No, if you shoot only for what the larder will hold. Of course with a dog I would have put up more pheasants from the hedgerows, but I got enough.

I only went up to the shoot on Saturday afternoons. Everybody knew that. Blossom, who was the tenant farmer, would have sworn to it, and I dare say that later he did. This Tuesday evening visit was due to accidents: that I had a slack afternoon at the office; that my gun happened to be at the gunsmith’s, waiting to be picked up; and that the weather promised a glorious hour before the sudden autumn twilight.

I didn’t use my gun and I moved around the shoot silently and for the most part under cover. I wanted to know the permanent population and its taste in feeding grounds. A little before sunset I established myself in the thick boundary hedge, whence I had an excellent view of four other hedges and a long, warm slope of down.

Blossom’s farm was long and narrow, running roughly north and south. Down the center was the level, bare watershed. The western slope was sharp, dropping to water meadows and a busy road; its short turf was dotted with clumps of thorn, gorse and bramble so thick that even hounds were baffled, and the foxes and rabbits kept up the balance of nature undisturbed. The eastern slope was slight, and fell away gradually to the boundary hedge, which, in places, was a jungle twenty feet thick. To the south were a hilltop barn and outhouses, and beyond them a few primmer, kinder meadows.

I stayed on in the hedge till dusk, watching the movements of a flock of pigeons. There wasn’t a soul about. Plowing was over, and there would be little work on the slopes until the kale came to be cut for winter feed and the sheep were folded on the roots. That autumn the whole work of the farm was going on in the water meadows and in the fields beyond the barn. .

At right angles to the boundary hedge was another, which had thrown out great domes and bastions of bramble. I was astonished to see, appearing from the curve of one of these bushes, the seat of a generous pair of trousers. The man was apparently pegging something down just inside the hedge, and working backwards towards me.

He half turned, and laid on the turf some sort of spike with a broad head.

Of course my mind leaped at once to rabbit traps; but when at last the man stood up, I saw that he wasn’t a farm laborer, and wasn’t dressed like a person who would be interested in rabbits. The expanse of cloth which he had persistently presented to me was town trouser.

If he were poaching, I thought, he ought to have either a dog or a companion. I looked more carefully into the dusk, and sure enough I found the companion. He was standing quite motionless on the top of the bank, under and against an ivy-covered oak, whence he could see for quarter of a mile on all sides of him. His disciplined stillness had its reward. A cock pheasant flew up to roost in the opposite tree. The trapper in the hedge saw it, drew an air pistol from his pocket and shot it neatly down.

This made me unduly angry. I wouldn’t have minded a bit if they had been local villagers out for next Sunday’s dinner, but from their clothes I knew they were not. Somehow I got it into my head that they were commercial poachers, come all the way from London or Bournemouth to supply the black market. I didn’t stop to think that, if they were, they wouldn’t be working hedgerows but would clear out some big estate where one overworked gamekeeper still managed to keep up a stock of game.

The watcher on the bank looked down at the ping of the shot. He hardly spoke above a whisper, but gave the impression of being almost hysterical with petty annoyance. The man with the air pistol said something obviously rude, picked up the pheasant and returned to his job. He continued to work with his back to me, now well outside the bush but still presenting his broad and perfect target.

The temptation was too great. I didn’t want the bother of handing them over to the law–supposing I could catch them–but I did want to teach them a lesson. The range was about eighty yards, far enough, I thought, to hurt but to do no damage that a probe and a little disinfectant couldn’t cure. I let him have a charge of No. 5 shot in the seat of the pants.

I talk lightly of this shocking brutality, but my conscience was and is appalled by the result. He straightened himself with a jerk, completely off balance as if he were diving from a springboard, and crashed heavily to the ground. He kicked twice and lay still, his face and shoulders on the thorns of the blackberry bush. His companion jumped down the far side of the bank and bolted across country with no thought but for his own safety. I didn’t call to him to stop. I was paralyzed by the shock of what I had done. And there was little doubt of it. No man who had life in him would lie in that position.

I don’t know how long I stared at him, perhaps ten seconds, perhaps twenty–a stillness which was partly horror and partly habit, acquired in war, of not giving my cover away. Then I dashed out of the hedge, taking a smack over the eye from an ash sapling, and ran to him.

I didn’t move the body at first, fearing, impossible though it seemed, that I had damaged the spine. I raised his coat, cut the waistband of his trousers and tore them down the seam. The pattern of the shot was regular and very shallow and exactly where it ought to have been. If a beater, in the days of big shoots, had suffered such an accident, he would have felt that a pint of beer and a brace of pheasants amply repaid the inconvenience.

Then I turned him over, and understood. He was like the men in the Bible. He had fallen on his sword. One of the broad-headed spikes had been lying on the ground, point uppermost like a giant thumbtack, and the round, shiny metal base was now pinned, a crimson-bordered decoration, to his left breast.

Instinctively I took hold to pull it out. Then a sort of panic reason took command and I let go, and wiped my fingerprints off it with his coat. Then I thought: Oh Lord, they’ll spot that somebody has wiped it! And after that my imagination took me through an entire dialogue with the police.

That damned mark across my eye. Signs of a struggle. You shot at him. Then he struck you. You lost your temper and stabbed him. How did the dead man’s clothes come to be torn? A wound of the spine, you thought! Ah, trying to make it manslaughter instead of murder, are you? Have you a respect for human life, Mr. Taine? Yes, profound. In the war you won a D.C.M. as a corporal, I believe? Yes, I did. How many men did you kill on that occasion? Damn you, do you suppose I counted them? You had further decorations after you were commissioned? Yes, I did. You seem to have enjoyed this single-handed stuff? I hated it, but my chaps were about all in. Come, come, Mr. Taine, now what really happened after the man struck you?

Well, no doubt I exaggerated. Perhaps some proofs could have been discovered by examination of the ground that my story was true. Perhaps I should never have been in the dock on a charge of murder. But most certainly I was guilty of manslaughter.

Now, if I am to explain properly the panic I was in, and what I did, I must tell a little about myself. My name is Roger Taine. I am thirty-four, with a family and no capital. I have a good job as Dorset agent for a big quarry combine, producing cement, roofing tiles, special bricks, stone for building and gravel for roads, and all sorts of by-products that interest an up-to-date architect or county surveyor. What with commission and salary, I’ve no complaints, but my family, of course, has no security beyond my own earning power.

So, as I stood over the corpse and watched the dark shadow–in a dusk already too deep to distinguish color-spreading over his clothes from beneath the head of that gigantic thumbtack, I passed from the police interrogation to what the judge would say. Shooting a harmless poacher as if I were some callous county magnate a hundred and fifty years ago. At the best criminally negligent. At the worst a savage sadist from whom society must be protected. Make an example of him. Five years.

I couldn’t expect to get less, and I deserved it. But when you have a family it’s not so much the sentence which counts as the result of it–the complete, irrevocable breaking of the continuity between past and future. I’m not one of your go-getters. A small post as a clerk with some charitable firm would be all I could hope for, and there, for the rest of my life, I should remain.

After hearing the judge’s remarks, I had no doubt at all that there weren’t going to be any judge’s remarks if I could help it. There was no one about. The dead man’s companion had cleared out without ever seeing me or even knowing where the shot came from. I caught a glimpse of him bolting over the skyline towards a lonely road which ran across the downs some five hundred yards from Blossom’s boundary, and then I saw the lights of a car gather speed and go tearing northwards.

I determined to get rid of the body where it wouldn’t be found. It was, I admit, the act of a bad citizen, and, to my present way of thinking, a great deal worse than taking a careful shot–for I was careful–at that broad and unexpectedly vulnerable target from a perfectly safe range.

The disposal of bodies, as anyone knows who reads the Sunday papers, is not easy: sooner or later they turn up. I could not hope to find a permanent solution then and there. He was too heavy to carry far, and I had no spade. The most I could do was to hide him, so that the man who ran away would assume, if he returned, that his companion had recovered and left. There was hardly any blood on the ground. No doubt police would have detected it, but it wasn’t visible to a casual eye.

I strapped my game bag over the wound and got him on my back. I was about to set off when it occurred to me that the traps were still in position. Was I to leave them or remove them? Either act might be evidence against me if there were ever any inquiry. I put him down, and hunted about in the last of the light. There were no traps at all. I found a spirit level, a foot rule and three more of those murderous broad-headed spikes.

The sweat poured down my ribs. Had I shot at some harmless Post Office surveyor? But that didn’t make sense. The wildest conjectures went through my head. Commando training? Broadcasting engineers? Some kind of official experiment? I had hoped, with an irresponsible, cowardly optimism that I suspect is shared by every criminal, that there would only be the most perfunctory search for my supposed poacher, or none at all; his accomplice hadn’t looked a man to get himself into the slightest trouble that could be avoided. But now it was absolutely certain that it would be some employer’s duty to make the most exhaustive inquiries.

It is curious how every animal, even a quarry agent, is a creature of habit. In the midst of this blinding mess, which should have excluded all other worries, I found time to be upset at the thought of returning home too late. My wife knew that I was up at the shoot, for I had telephoned from Dorchester after leaving my office. She would be anxious when I didn’t return at nightfall, and the children would catch her mood and refuse to go to sleep. I hated the thought of inventing some long and complicated lie. I never do lie to her. There’s no reason for it.

That made me impatient, and over-anxious for a quick and temporary solution. I should have bicycled home, got out my car and taken the body a hundred miles away from my shoot. The following night when, for all I knew, the place might be teeming with policemen, it would be impossible. The bicycle I must explain. Partly to save petrol, but more to keep fit, I always bicycled to and from the office on days when I knew I wasn’t going to need the car. And so that evening the bicycle was all I had.

I carried my burden half a mile along the top of the down, and dropped it, together with all its tools, into a rabbit warren. This was a hollow which must once have been a dew pond or a flint pit. The steep sides were honeycombed with rabbit holes, so large and so close together that once when I climbed down to pick up a shot rabbit the earth gave way and I sank over the knees. It was an unsavory spot, with the carcasses of half a dozen sheep at the bottom, which had died of disease and been thrown there to rot.

I stamped on the tunnels and galleries until the soil caved in. Then I laid the corpse in this irregular trench and lightly covered it. In the pockets and on the clothes there was nothing to prove identity–or at any rate nothing that I could see by the light of matches. I was careful to leave no smooth slope of new earth, and reckoned that there would be nothing suspicious to a casual eye. The only risk I ran was from a dog, which could track me across the down if he were put onto my scent in time.

I picked up my gun and returned to my bicycle, which was leaning against a haystack just off the upper road. On the way home I stopped at the edge of a fast stream and let the water run over my game bag and my coat to dissolve the blood. I wished to heaven that I had had more experience of police methods than odd bits and pieces gathered from newspaper reports and detective stories. War experience –well, there was that, and I suppose in a way it was useful. At any rate I had carried a dead man before though I didn’t know he was dead till we arrived. War, too, had convinced me that a remarkable deal of crime is never discovered at all.